Aten (also Aton)

The temples built for it had no roofs. Where other Egyptian gods waited in the dark of sealed sanctuaries, attended by priests who alone were permitted to look upon them, this one demanded open courts beneath the bare sky, altars heaped with bread and fruit and flowers under the full weight of the noon sun. The heat came straight down. The light fell on everything equally, on the king and the offering and the stone, and that was the whole theology in a single image: a god you could not walk into a building to find, because it was already everywhere the sun could reach.

Aten was the disk of the sun. Not a man with a sun for a head, not a falcon, not a beetle rolling the dawn over the horizon, but the thing itself, the bright circle in the sky. The name began as something almost dully literal. In the older language an aten was simply a disk, anything flat and round, and the sun was the disk of the day; the moon, by the same logic, could be called the silver aten. For centuries it named a part of Ra rather than a god in its own right, the visible body of the sun, the burning face that crossed the heavens while the deeper divinity worked behind it.

By the Middle Kingdom the disk had edged toward personhood, still folded inside Ra, still an aspect rather than a name to pray to. Then a king took an interest. Amenhotep III favored the sun, called himself the Dazzling Aten, named a pleasure-barge and a palace for it, and let the old solar god try on this new face. None of that was yet a revolution. The revolution belonged to his son.

Amenhotep IV came to the throne and within a few years stopped being Amenhotep IV. He renamed himself Akhenaten, effective for the Aten, and rebuilt a civilization’s religion around the disk in the sky. The other gods were not merely demoted. Their temples were shut, their revenues seized, their images defaced; the name of Amun, the great hidden god of Thebes, was chiselled out of inscriptions across Egypt, even where it sat inside the king’s own father’s name. In place of the crowded pantheon there was one god, and that god had one prophet, and the prophet was the king. Akhenaten left the old capitals and built a new city on an empty plain at a bend in the Nile, raw desert no god had yet claimed, and called it Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten. He swore he would never leave it.

The image they carved there is one of the strangest in Egyptian art, and one of the most tender. The disk hangs at the top of the scene, a plain circle with a royal cobra at its base, and from it long thin rays come down like rain. Each ray ends in a small human hand. Some of the hands are empty, some hold the ankh, the looped sign of life, and these press the ankh gently to the noses of the king and his family, breathing life into them directly. It is the only scrap of human form the god was ever granted, those dozens of little hands, and they touch no one but the royal house. The rays reach for Akhenaten, for Nefertiti, for their daughters, and for no one else. Everyone else in Egypt reached the god through them.

What the Aten was meant to be is set down in a long poem carved into the tomb of a courtier named Ay, the Great Hymn to the Aten, which the king may have composed himself. It is a genuinely beautiful thing. It watches the sun go down and the world fill with the dread of the dark, lions out, snakes biting, the house gone silent; then it watches the dawn climb and the whole earth wake, birds lifting their wings, ships moving both ways on the river, the chick speaking inside its egg. It praises a god who made every land and every people, who set a Nile in the sky to rain on foreign countries and a Nile underground for Egypt, who gave each race its own skin and its own tongue. O sole god, beside whom there is no other. Centuries later parts of Psalm 104 would echo its phrasing closely enough that the argument over the connection has never quite settled.

The god’s power was light, and through light, life. It was not a war god or a judge of the dead or a curer of particular ills. It simply made things live, all things, continuously, by shining; the warmth on the back of the neck and the green coming up in the fields were the same act. There was no story of its birth, no consort, no enemy, no death and resurrection in the night. It did nothing but give, and it asked in return only to be named the one source of everything.

That was also its fatal flaw. A god with no stories is hard to love. The Aten had no boat-journey through the underworld, no battle with chaos at the rim of dawn, no grieving widow gathering the pieces of a murdered husband, none of the drama that had tied ordinary people to their gods for three thousand years. It had a king, and almost nothing else. When the king died, the god died with him. Akhenaten was gone within a few years of his city’s completion, and the experiment came apart quickly. His successors drifted back to the old gods; the boy who had been Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, folding Amun’s name back into his own, and Akhetaten was left to the sand. Work crews went over the temple walls and levered the disk and its rays out of the stone. The priesthoods Akhenaten had stripped returned hungry, and later kings struck his name from the king-lists and called him only the enemy. The open courts filled with drift. The sun kept rising over the abandoned altars, which was the one thing about it that had always been true.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the Egyptian god Aten?

Aten was the ancient Egyptian god of the sun-disk, the visible circle of the sun in the sky. Originally an aspect of the sun god Ra, the Aten was elevated by Pharaoh Akhenaten into the sole god of Egypt, worshipped as the creator and sustainer of all life.

Why did Akhenaten worship only the Aten?

Akhenaten believed the Aten was the one true god and the single source of all life, so he made it the only deity Egyptians were permitted to worship. He closed the temples of the other gods, seized their wealth, erased the name of Amun from monuments, and built a new capital called Akhetaten dedicated entirely to the Aten.

What did the Aten look like?

The Aten was never shown as a human or an animal, unlike every other major Egyptian god. It was depicted as a plain solar disk with a royal cobra at its base, sending down long rays that ended in small human hands, some of which held the ankh sign of life to the noses of the royal family.

What is the Great Hymn to the Aten?

The Great Hymn to the Aten is a poem praising the Aten as the sole creator of all lands, peoples, and living things, possibly written by Akhenaten himself. Its fullest version was carved into the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna, and its language closely parallels passages in Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible.

What happened to the worship of Aten after Akhenaten died?

The worship of the Aten collapsed almost immediately after Akhenaten’s death. His successors restored the traditional gods, the young king Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, the city of Akhetaten was abandoned, and later rulers dismantled Akhenaten’s monuments and struck his name from the official records.

Related Entries

Ra, Amun-Re, Atum, Khepri, Horus, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Ptah, Thoth, Maat